Serbian statistics list Vlach and Romanian languages separately depending on what people declared in the census. This, however, does not mean that Serbian government has official position whether Vlach and Romanian are separate languages. ISO hadn't assigned it a separate language code to the ISO 639 standard. In the 2002 census, 40,054 people in Serbia declared themselves ethnic Vlachs and 54,818 people declared themselves native speakers of the Vlach language. The Vlach language does not have any official status and it is not standardized, thus some members of Vlach community ask for official usage of standard Romanian in the areas inhabited by Vlachs until the standardization of the Vlach language. For historical reasons connected with the multicultural region of Vojvodina, Romanian is listed as a separate language in latest Serbian census, the number of its speakers was 34,515, while 34,576 people declared themselves as ethnic Romanians. The declared Vlach speakers are mostly concentrated in eastern Serbia, mainly in the Timočka Krajina region and adjacent areas, while declared Romanian speakers are mostly concentrated in Vojvodina. According to some sources in the media, Serbia recognized "Romanian" as the native language of the Vlach community, through the act of confirmation of the National Council of the Vlach National Minority in August 2007; the organization had listed Romanian as the native language of the community in their statute.
Features
Its two main variants, Ungurean and Țăran, are subordonated forms of the Romanian varieties spoken in Banat and Oltenia, respectively. The speakers have been isolated from Romania and their speech did not keep up with the neologisms borrowed by the Romanian speakers on the other shore of the Danube from French and Italian and as such, they're using Serbian counterparts instead, as Serbian has been the language of education for nearly two centuries.
Name
The English term Vlach comes from the Serbian term for the language, while Romanian or Roumanian comes from the Romanian counterpart. Further on, the Vlach Democratic Party of Serbia is called "Partidul Democrat al Rumânilor din Sârbia" and "Vlaška Demokratska Stranka" in Serbian. This happens also with the others institutions of the Vlach minority.
Usage in media
Radio Zaječar and Radio Pomoravlje broadcast programmes in the Vlach language.
